On Not Talking to Strangers: Researching the Micro Worlds of Girls through Visual Auto-ethnographic Practices

Berghahn Books

On Not Talking to Strangers: Researching the Micro Worlds of Girls through Visual Auto-ethnographic PracticesAuthor(s): Gerry Bloustien and Sarah BakerSource: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, Vol. 47, No.3 (Fall 2003), pp. 64-79Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23170096 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 14:51

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Berghahn Books is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Analysis: TheInternational Journal of Social and Cultural Practice.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.101 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 14:51:58 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=berghahnbooks

http://www.jstor.org/stable/23170096?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


On Not Talking to Strangers

Researching the Micro Worlds of Girls through Visual Auto-ethnographic Practices

Gerry Bloustien and Sarah Baker

Abstract

How can visual ethnography help us to understand the nature and

the complexity of the (ethnic/gendered/classed) experience of growing

up? Drawing on two ethnographic projects, we discuss the purposes and the difficulties of the particular methodology of auto-visual

ethnography which we deployed. Our specific focus was the relation

ship and the tension between the representation and the individual

everyday experiences. Through focusing upon the micro worlds of

the young people themselves within their wider 'parent' cultures, their engagement with home, school, and outside leisure activities,

were revealed to be strategically (if sometimes unconsciously) part of

much larger overlapping social spheres and powerful cultural influ

ences. The pre-teenage and teenage female participants were invited

to document any aspects of their worlds on cameras and video.

Key words: Visual ethnography, pre-teen, teenage, gender, ethics,

access, social praxeology

The experience of perceiving oneself is now taken to be the most alienating

experience of objectness possible. And most importantly, an experience one

deceives oneself about in the search for the unified self. (Forrester 1987: 15)

My baby photos—I want to burn them because I look cute. I'm always smiling. It's not the real me. I don't like people taking photos of me when I'm smiling. (Amelia, aged nine)

Sometimes I look in the mirror and I think, my goodness, this is me. (Hilary,

aged fifteen)

Social Analysis, Volume 47, Issue 3, Fall 2003



On Not Talking to Strangers c-o

Introduction or Snapshots from Our Field Work

1. Felicity, age eight, had been to a "fairy breakfast," an event organized by a pop ular Adelaide radio station for its pre-teens listeners. At the breakfast, Felicity had an opportunity to meet her favorite radio personality, Amanda Blair. She

talked excitedly of how she took photos of Amanda Blair with her research cam

era, and wanted to get her prints developed quickly so that she could see how

they turned out. Suddenly, she stopped, discovering that in her excitement she

had failed to rewind the film and so, exposed to sunlight, it was now ruined.

Weeping, she miserably tried to explain the importance of the photographs: how

they were pictures of her with Amanda Blair, and how these were pictures that

could never be captured again. 2. Diane, aged fifteen was, in her own words, "seriously into Peter Andre" and

several other pop boy-bands. The walls of her bedroom, her style of dress, the

tapes, and CDs in her personal collection, and the music blaring from her

tape-recorder, all attested to her intense fandom. As she told me one day, somewhat theatrically, "Peter Andre is someone I look up to and admire." In

the privacy of her bedroom, she and her friends videotaped their watching of

his latest video clip on her own TV set, then danced to the music and sang aloud to the words. Her friends distanced themselves somewhat from her

intensity, however, by dancing exaggeratedly; their movements become a par

ody of the models in the music clip. It was not too cool, even among her own

friendship group, to show too much admiration for this particular pop star.

3. Hilary, also fifteen, unwittingly echoed Forrester's observations cited above.

She held a small mirror up to her face in her left hand while her right hand held

a small video camera. The effect in the video frame is an image of her own face,

complete with camera lens turned upon her self and symbolically enclosed

within her left hand. As cited in the epigraph above, she exclaimed in voice

over, clearly audible on the video track "My goodness, this is me" (fig. 5.1).

Figure 5.1: "My goodness, this is me." Source: Hilary, self-portrait.




Mapping Girlhood: A Tale of Two Projects

These are just a few snap shots from various stages of our fieldwork under

taken in Adelaide, South Australia, between 1993 and 2003. Through two dis crete though related longitudinal ethnographic projects, we focused upon the

micro worlds of a number of girls from the young participants' own perspec

tives, perspectives simultaneously contextualized within each person's wider

familial, cultural, and social background. In Baker's project the participants were aged from eight to eleven years old, while in Bloustien's research the girls were teenagers aged between fifteen to eighteen.1

In both projects, the authors were investigating the ways in which all of these young people simultaneously constituted and represented their own sense of a (gendered) self. That is, one of the aims was to explore how each

young person understood 'growing up female' within her own social and eth

nic micro-culture at particular stages in her life. Both studies were based on two

key premises: that firstly, such (gendered) identity making within the groupings themselves was often naturalized, seen to be implicit, and therefore often not

discussed in popular discourse, and yet, learning to be female and "perform ing" femininity was clearly 'hard work' (Smith 1988). Secondly, that identity is not a fixed attribute but a process (Battaglia 1995; Bhabha 1987; Hall 1996). More importantly for this essay, both authors deployed, amongst other method

ological tools, a particularly reflexive use of auto-visual ethnography, where the

young people themselves were invited to use photographs and video to explore

their own worlds. The extracts above point to the importance of visual repre

sentation in the lives of our young respondents—a centrality which became clearer as the research projects proceeded. We will detail the purpose and some

of the effects of such representation below, highlighting the pivotal role of the

visual in our research, but first it is important, albeit briefly, to outline the main

aims and concerns of each study. Then, we will explain the particular effects and problematics of this methodology.

Bloustien's project, Girl Making, began in 1993 as part of a doctoral thesis and ultimately spanned ten years, long after the original doctoral project was

completed.2 As indicated above, the focus was on the ways in which ten young

women (self-selected from sixty-five young people participating in the project overall), came to negotiate the difficulties and contradictions of growing up gendered within their own worlds and from their own perspectives. The key participants were invited from a range of social groupings and cultural and eth nic backgrounds in South Australia. Later this study was augmented by six other similar case studies of young women in the U.K. and the U.S. At the start of the project, the age of the girls was approximately fifteen years, and so their

participation continued until they were eighteen. This period is the time, at least in most postindustrial Western cultures, when the teenager is popularly

recognized as moving from childhood toward new levels of maturity and adult hood. With that transition come new expectations, new responsibilities, and new demands. Several social and legal infrastructures underpin these stages; for



On Not Talking to Strangers 67

example, in Australia, at sixteen a young person can gain a driver's license, and

at eighteen they can legally enter a licensed premises and purchase alcohol. Sixteen also marks the entry into senior high school, and although one is

legally a minor until eighteen, a youth can engage in heterosexual intercourse

and can be legally married without parental consent—but one cannot vote.

Baker's project, which commenced in 2000, and also began as her doctoral

research, particularly focussed upon the place of popular music in the everyday lives of seven pre-teen girls aged eight to eleven years old. Popular culture was

found to be central to the ways each of the girls struggled to simultaneously

constitute and represent aspects of her cultural identity. In particular, their

engagement with popular music as consumers and music makers was an essen

tial part of their personal narrative to locate 'the real me' (Bhabha 1987; see Baker 2001; 2002). Their struggles to find a 'fit' between circulating familial, cultural, and societal discourses, on the one hand, and on the other, the dis

courses of popular music and its related commodities became clear as the

research proceeded. Their activities as consumers and music makers provided effective vehicles for each girl to locate her own cultural practices (practices largely devalued by society) within wider cultural contexts. This was espe

cially the case in the participants' negotiation of older girlhood, with popular music opening up a space to contest conflicting discourses of what it means to be young and female in contemporary Australia.

In both research projects, the participants were invited to represent their own worlds through visual images—mainly still-cameras in the case of Baker's

research (see 2001) and video cameras in Bloustien's (see 1998; 2003). The girls were encouraged to capture, select, film, and edit any aspect of their lives that they wished. The invitation in essence was to 'play' with the camera, using it

to explore their worlds freely.3

The original methodological aim was to provide a way for us to get to know

the girls and their worlds from their own perspectives. The particular camera

selected proved to be an important aspect of the strategy. So, for example, Bloustien's research deployed the smallest but most advanced technologically obtainable at the time. At the start of the fieldwork that meant it was Hi Eight,

compact video-cam. Later, in the explorations of the world of other girls in Indi ana and in London, an even smaller digital camera was used, as the technology became more readily available and affordable. The particular choice of the cameras with their advanced technology enabled their use without lights and external microphones, so that they would therefore be as unobtrusive in the

girls' lives as possible. That decision proved to be an inspired one, as several of the girls affirmed that it was the compact nature of the camera that gave them a sense of confidence and freedom to experiment.

In Baker's project, each of the key girls was given a single-reflex camera and

tape recorder (standard note-taker) during the course of the fieldwork. Having these methodological tools under the girls' complete control enabled them to

represent their experiences and to have their voices heard. It also meant that each girl had the opportunity to collect material which had relevance to her




everyday life, offering further glimpses into the girls' engagement with popular music and their related struggles over 'self-making'. The girls also had oppor tunities to discuss their material with the researcher and with each other. Many

an afternoon in after-school care was spent looking at photos, hearing record

ings, and telling stories of how and why the material came into being. As in Bloustien's research outlined above, the research cameras in Baker's

project were deliberately selected for their ease of use. In this case they were

35mm cameras with a built-in three way flash and large view-finder. Although initially the girls were given disposable cameras, quite quickly this was swapped for a standard camera because it had a very useful function—a self-timer. This enabled the camera's operator to be in the shot and therefore provided a great function for self-portraiture, as explained below.

The aim in both projects was to learn more about the girls' processes and

strategies of survival—and in some cases, failure. What sort of psychological and social support systems provided 'safe passage'? What types of material

environments, learning experiences, and social networks hindered that proc ess? Previous work on girlhood and adolescence has tended to start from the

simplistic, self-explanatory premise that the girls were members of bounded classed or ethnic groupings. The emphasis then centered on the girls' sense of

their social entrapment or trajectory of success with these groupings (Walker dine et al. 2001) or their marginalization through their particular classed posi tioning within their wider culture (Skeggs 1997). The unfortunate effect is to create deterministic circular arguments that belie the complexity of the real lived experiences of the children and young women in question, so that, for

example, (black/Asian/impoverished) working class women are seen as behav

ing in particular ways because they are (black/Asian/impoverished) working

class. In the lived everyday experiences of the young people in these studies,

however, it was clear that nothing could be reduced to one particular element

of cultural or social identity. Rather, the various strands of class, gender, and

ethnicity, not only were inextricably intertwined, but even more importantly,

also constantly jostled for importance and dominance depending on the par ticular situation and circumstance.

It is also important to remember firstly, that in both studies, the key partici pants were not the only 'respondents' in the projects. It was from their under

standings that their stories are told, but circling around them were their close friends and acquaintances, their families, their carers, and for some, particularly significant authority figures—representatives of youth social services, the juve nile justice system and the law courts. Neither project understood any girl to be a 'free floating' individual, but rather one who, in her own perception, was at the center of her own social network. It was this crucial nexus, this tension between the elusive sense of 'authentic self' she struggled to realize through her serious play and the 'me' embedded within a mesh of social and cultural under

standings and constraints, which we explored in our respective projects. Secondly, like a transparent layer of perspective over the top of these set

tings, was what emerged from the photographs, the videos, and the filmic




processes. For through the boundaries and perceptual frames that the girls

placed upon themselves, as they struggled to represent themselves and their

worlds, were the ways in which they acknowledged these particular social and cultural values, networks, and constraints. For the girls, the cameras became

ways of interpreting and redefining their worlds, ways which frequently ex

pressed far more than the girls were capable of saying, for often it was what was not said that was important. Not everything they produced was for public view

ing. Indeed, not everything was photographed or filmed in the first place. Not

everything was documented in the same way. What we came to understand was

that the selection, the filmic, and the editing processes highlighted the ways in which all of the girls were struggling to represent themselves, off camera, in

ways that cohered with their already established social and cultural frameworks.

Clearly, then, the use of the camera as a methodological tool, and more

importantly, placed in the hands and under the control of the young partici

pants, deepened and precipitated a number of previously unforeseen dimen

sions to the research projects. We will examine some of these dimensions below with some further examples from our fieldwork, but firstly, a brief revisit to the role of the visual in (Western) contemporary culture.

Visual Representation as a Research Tool

The photograph, perhaps more so than the sound recording, is a powerful tool

in the representation of identity. For example, in Western industrialized soci

eties, photography has established a pervasive presence in children's lives from

yearly school photos to regular family and holiday snaps. This has been helped

by the relatively low cost of cameras, film, and processing, making photogra

phy an affordable and accessible occasional hobby for many adults who wish

to photograph their children (Higonnet 1998; Holland 1997). In fact, as Higon net points out, in the United States of America alone "[bullions of amateur

snap shots of children are taken each year" (1998: 9). Yet at the same time, it is also recognized that the children being photographed "have very little say over how they are pictured" (Holland 1997: 107). In contrast, in the research

projects outlined above, the cameras and video cameras offered the girls a

(symbolic) space to play. The images were records of their personal everyday experiences, their own (micro) cultures (Prosser and Schwartz 1998), and even more importantly, from their own perspectives. Such photographs can reveal the image-makers' "categories of experience, belief and feeling, their priorities and values" (Kellehear 1993: 77). Photographs are clearly a powerful vehicle for telling a story of the 'self'.

And more than this, for with each new development in technology, the cam

era, the video, the computer and all their related technologies have increasingly demonstrated that what we understood as reality and capable of being objec tively represented is, in fact, constituted through its representations. It is not sur

prising, then, that personal photography has become a medium through which




the narrative of identity is explored, confirmed, and negotiated (Holland 1997). Although a photograph is temporally and physically bounded, capturing only a brief moment within the limited field of the camera's vision, the photographers, in the case of this research, pre-teen and teenage girls, eagerly and sometimes,

anxiously "show us their view of the world" (Gross et al. 1988: 18). In so

doing, the use of a camera in the hands of the participants can offer access to

aspects of everyday life that in ordinary fieldwork circumstances the ethnogra pher might not be privileged to see.

Increasingly, the camera has now gone far beyond a simple recording device. It occupies a fascinating and contradictory role, both as a voyeuristic tool for surveillance and as a means of control. It lends itself to being a tool for under

standing others and for being reflexive about oneself. It provides a chance for 'surveillance' or a monitoring of the self. Photographic images have become even more crucial to the ways in which we understand our worlds and our own

places within them, enabling us to see ourselves as others see us. Frozen in the

form of memory, photographic images allow us to re-create ourselves. Old

selves can be wiped out as though they had never been—new selves can cre

atively be reborn (Peace 1991). Taussig (1987; 1993), inspired by Benjamin's insights concerning photography and other examples of "the art of mechanical

reproduction," in his own work extended the concept of mimesis, embodied

ways of becoming other, to consider the multitude of ways we still learn to

"become other" (1993: xiii). With the development of highly technologized ways of representing the self and the worlds beyond our own understandings, Taussig argues that the fusion between the two has become greater. Mimesis or

embodied mimicry becomes a way of overcoming fear or uncertainty, of regain ing control by becoming other "wherein the replication, the copy acquires the

power from the represented" (1993: 16). We see this in our eagerness to pho

tograph and to record ourselves where, through our images, we often test out

our possible selves, exploring the 'me' who is both like you and distinct from

you; a self who is both me and not me at the same time. The strategies or play with representation and image, demonstrated by the

young people in our research revealed this testing to be an ambivalent and con

tradictory agency. Often, for example, the girls' play involved their taking upon themselves different expressions of femininity, refracted through their particu lar emotional investments and identifications with particular aspects of ethnic

ity and class. Sometimes it was an exaggerated expression of femininity, seeming to express what Taussig has called a form of "mimetic excess," a way of exploring the possibilities and simultaneously rejecting them through play (1993: 255).

We will return shortly to some more detailed examples of these moments of mimesis and mimetic excess, but first, the question of why the camera was so successful and so efficacious an entry point into the field across different social

domains and locales needs to be addressed.




Camera Power

The most obvious explanation for the girls' enthusiastic participation in both

projects was that they saw the task of representing themselves on camera and

video as exciting. Unlike questionnaires or interviews, which may be perceived as dull and time-consuming, leaving little room for personal involvement and

experimentation, here the girls felt they could be more active participants. They also seemed to understand immediately that being invited to experiment with the camera they would have far more control over the final product. As Baker

explains below, the younger girls had never had the opportunity to experiment

so freely with single Reflex cameras and note takers before. Even the teenagers

in the Girl Making project had not previously had this kind of freedom to exper iment, select, video, and edit with handicams. Equipment such as this is rarely offered without particular constraints or set tasks for young people, and this

proved to be particularly so for the girls according to their own accounts. This

was an invitation in both situations to 'play' with the equipment as they chose.4 For our part, we believed the technology could offer a number of positive

dimensions to our research. As it became immediately clear that all of the girls were interested in learning the practical skill of using a camera and producing a visual record for themselves, we were immediately able to offer some reci

procity within the research relationship rather than feeling we were just plun dering the cultural world of our young participants. This, we felt, was a

particularly important ethical consideration because of the inevitable power relationship involved due to the relatively young age and education level of our

potential participants.

Rethinking Power Relations

In many accounts of fieldwork, the intrinsic power relations between researcher

and researched have often remained embedded in the resulting texts of an

ethnographic project rather than acknowledged. Indeed, the 'silence' and its

wider political ramifications have become of concern to many in recent years

(see Fabian 1983; 1991; Rosaldo 1986; Said 1978; 1989). These are difficult

dilemmas, for simply acknowledging the power imbalance in research situations does not eradicate it. One suggested solution which has been particularly favored by feminist scholars has been that of collaboration between the re searcher and the people researched, arguing that intimate participation of the individuals in the research design, process, and interpretations of the research is the most appropriate solution (Abu-Lughod 1991; Crapanzano 1986; Dwyer 1982). Of course, this issue becomes far more complex when there is a large age discrepancy between the researcher and the young participants. As a

stranger and outsider to young peoples' established social networks, it is rare for an adult researcher to be physically invited into certain spaces, such as bed rooms or the homes of participants' friends and relatives.5



72 Gerry Bloustien and Sarah Baker

In these cases, as in our research with children and teenage girls, the cam

era became a tool for 'ethnography by proxy' (see also Wallman et al. 1980).

That is, when given to participants for extended periods of time, the camera could venture where we could not. Later, as in all ethnographic fieldwork, the

development of trust and friendship between the researchers, the girls, and

their families did allow physical access and acceptance into the worlds. What was clear, though, was that the cameras did give the young people license to

explore these places of play through the 'objectifying' lens, a license which, in

turn, helped to blur the more traditional lines between researcher and re

searched, and offered new insights about the nature of research.

In both projects, it also became clear that the use of the camera was able to

provide the means of giving the participants an authoritative voice, which was distinct from that of the researchers' and from any official voice. This is not to

suggest naively that their photographs, their audio-tapes or the products of their

videos would somehow speak for themselves, or that what the girls produced would somehow be a more authentic version of how they saw their worlds than

our interpretation of events. The product of the camera can never simply be a reflection of what was, of actuality, somehow raw and unprocessed, just wait

ing to be harvested. Rather, we argue that the methodology was a way of mak

ing the process of mutual discovery and creativity of both the researcher and

subjects more transparent. That is, the camera offered insights into the 'layering' of ethnography, the different ways understanding and knowledge are negotiated and realized as part of everyday transactions in the world.

As researchers, our interest particularly focussed upon this layering, the gaps between the different modes of representation. There were the moments and

events the girls choose not to photograph or film at all. These were occasions that

we had been able to observe and note in actuality through our everyday ordinary

contact with the girls and their wider social networks and experiences, but which

were perhaps too 'ordinary' or too threatening to be captured on film at all. One

extreme example of this was when Mary, a teenager in the Girl Making Project, was keen to talk off camera about her experiments with drugs including 'magic mushrooms'. On many occasions, she and her friends would give detailed accounts of shop lifting, car theft, and chases in the city. These accounts were

later further detailed and contextualized by Mary's social worker.6 On camera, however, Mary was keen to show herself as a respectable,

socially responsible self for others to see and understand. It was a way of con

structing a self narrative that she could feel good about: "I felt through making this film I could acknowledge myself. I can see some very good parts in me"

(Mary at age eighteen). Then there were the moments captured on film but not

openly shared with the researchers or others, removed as though they had never been. So, for example, in Baker's project, nine-year-old Rosa, had taken a series of shots. When Rosa looked through the developed prints in front of

Baker, she suddenly hid certain ones from the adult's view, looking slightly embarrassed yet still poring over each of the images herself. "You can't see

those," she said, "they're personal."




What did Rosa see in these photographs as she pondered her reflection?

Possibly she felt that feeling of strangeness, a feeling that Benjamin tells us "is the same kind as the estrangement felt before one's own image in the mir

ror" ([1935] 1968: 224). It is a sense of detachment, of being 'me' but 'not

me', and this is the disruptive power of mimesis. Similar moments occurred in Bloustien's research, such as when Grace, filming in and talking about her bedroom with the researcher suddenly stopped and asked Bloustien to leave the room because "I want to dance." Then, alone in her room, in front of the

camera, she danced to her favorite audio tape for ten minutes, this time record

ing herself as she moved rhythmically to the music, before she invited the researcher back inside and resumed filming. Although she said Bloustien could watch the tape later, it seemed as though at that moment she wanted to expe

rience and record the moment alone. It was a moment of the 'unsaid', perhaps

the 'unsayable', a poignant moment of when the embodied self reflects upon and constitutes itself as other. In this very process of watching, Grace was car

rying out an 'objectification' of her self, a chance to survey, to alter, to become

something and someone else. It was, above all, a surveillance of her self as a

'body in action'.7

In contrast, there were other moments the girls felt would be important to

allow us to share, that is, activities deliberately captured on film or video to be shared with an audience. The range of stylistic approaches was quite wide, par ticularly by the teenagers; at certain times, one could see echoes of music video

clips, parodies of documentaries, or mock current affairs formats. At other times,

there were more serious, self-conscious attempts to document the fun, the

movement, and excitement of their social engagements by using handheld cam

era techniques. Here the camera was in the middle of the activity rather than

standing by 'objectively' recording events. It was the tension or the gaps between these different types of representation, which echoed the struggles of

the girls themselves to find a psychic fit between their experimental play and the constraints of their everyday lives. On the surface, such attempts at representa

tion seem like 'just play', but under close analysis, we can see specific strategies, the human seriousness of play (Goffman 1970; Handelman 1990; Turner 1982), providing insights into the ways gendered subjectivity is performed and simul

taneously constituted. Again, this needs to be seen as identity as process (Hall

1987), with popular culture (especially television, film, and music) playing a

vitally important role in its production. Let us return to the fieldwork examples

for more detail of how this aspect of the projects was realized.

'Little Girls' Taking Photos

When the pre-teen girls were first given their cameras a few weeks into Baker's

fieldwork, these tools immediately became central to the girls' self-making. As indicated above, the camera's capacities to capture mimesis enabled the girls in the project to experiment with image and play with representation in ways




unavailable to them previously. Although all the girls had some access to pho

tographic equipment, either at home or school, before Baker began the re

search, this access was occasional and limited. Never before had they been

given the freedom to experiment with a camera on the scale available in this

research. The capacity for reflexivity was enhanced considerably by the intro

duction of the cameras with the self-timer. The self-timer meant that no longer did the girls have to rely on the outstretched arm technique to take photos of

themselves in private. The self-timer increased the opportunity to play with

identity through the photographic image. As Amelia told Baker: "It's like a

magical camera." Is it possible that Amelia recognized in this 'magical camera' the magic of

mimesis? Taussig reminds us that the important point about this magic is "that 'in some way or another' the making and existence of the artifact that portrays

something gives one power over that which is portrayed" (1993: 13). The

power Taussig refers to is a power to 'make sense' of the representation of 'self', the impossible 'real me', which cannot be mastered. The ambiguity of this

power means that at the same time an attempt is made to manage identity, "any

possibility of mastering" a sense of the real me is disrupted (Taussig 1993: 246). Amelia articulates such a disruption in the epigraph at the beginning of this article when, on unexpectedly discovering a photograph of her younger self in her desk drawer, she exclaimed, "It's not the real me." In Bloustien's research,

Sara expressed the same sense of paradox—the striving for authenticity to rep

resent the elusive 'real me'. Direct to camera, but grinning ironically she told her audience: "I've changed a lot over the three years which made editing hard. Sometimes looking at myself was like looking in a mirror at a great big zit."8 In both projects, the way each girl used the single reflex or video camera

to simultaneously interrogate and constitute her sense of identity revealed a

questioning of a unified self, and a great deal about how she saw herself

through several different possible engendered subject positions (Moore 1994). It highlighted the sense of uncertainty that the girls' experienced as they strug

gled to manage this elusive sense of self. The point is that there is no one sin

gle subject position offered to these girls growing up but many. The fact that

they were aware of these multiple conflicting discursive sites can be illustrated

by a close look at the ways these girls constituted themselves, 'experimented' with a variety of images and poses.

Look at nine-year-old Rosa's photograph of herself (fig. 5.2). The self-timer is conducive of "posing," the making of "another body" and transformation of the self "in advance into an image" (Barthes 2000: 10). Once the button was

pressed, Rosa had ten seconds to constitute herself before the camera. Sur

rounded by other reflective surfaces—a mirror, a television screen, a window— Rosa's body was transformed into a doll-like stance. Mimicking the dolls in the

background, Rosa looked away from the camera. Yet at the same time, Rosa

returned the camera's gaze, issuing a challenge from her school photograph

hanging on the wall. As Barthes writes:



On Not Talking to Strangers rs

Figure 5.2: Rosa Posing. Source: Rosa, self-portrait.

I pose, I know I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing, but (to square the circle) this additional message must in no way alter the precious essence of my

individuality: what I am, apart from any effigy. What 1 want, in short, is that my

(mobile) image, buffeted among a thousand shifting photographs, altering with sit

uation and age, should always coincide with my (profound) 'self'. (2000: 11-12)

This "profound" self is that which is created by a narrative of 'the real me'. As

Gergen and Gergen claim, "our 'self-reflexivity'—our discourse about who we

are—depends on our expertise in narrativizing" (1991: 92-93). So whilst pho tography can be utilized to interrogate and question identity, it can also be seen to confirm our narrative of identity and momentarily make concrete that elu

sive sense of 'the real me'.

Conclusion

It is clear that the quality of the photographs or video is not the focus of such auto-visual ethnography. The researchers' interest was in the girls' play with these tools, and the process of the girls' representations of themselves and

their cultural practices on film. We were interested in what each girl chose to

photograph and video, and also aspects of their social worlds that were not

captured or were discarded by the girls. It was because we engaged with the

girls in their social worlds that we were able to understand the significance of



76 Gerry Bloustien ana Sarah Baker

these missing moments and gaps. With these methodological tools, the girls were provided with an opportunity to express, explore, and represent their

(aged/gendered) selves and their engagement with popular culture. In particu lar, the cameras were a means to capture social reproduction. They illustrated

our participants' constructions of social reality, and their struggles to impose their vision in ways that were determined by their positions in the social world

(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). The point, then, is not what is produced with the visual tool, but how the production relates to the position occupied by the

producer in the particular field of that production.

In this essay, through obvious limitations of space, we have explored just one aspect of the two research projects—the use of the cameras by the girls as

a means to 'play with' and explore possible identities. In the case of the Girl

Making Project, when the girls came to edit and condense their footage in the edit suite, the exercise proved to be even more liberating because sound and

image could be separated; new narratives could be created and told. Through that strategy, 'old selves' could be scrutinized for their ability to express the 'me as I am now'.

In this essay, we have drawn on concepts of play and mimesis to argue that the camera's power does not lie in its ability to create an impression of reality (see Baudry 1986), but rather, in its palpable and disturbing ability to express 'otherness' or what Taussig refers to in his work as alterity. Benjamin calls this "the physical shock effect" (1968: 238) which "disrupts the traditional, histor ical and phenomenological structures that claimed to regulate perception and to ground and unify the ego" (Shaviro 1993: 32).

This particular method of auto visual ethnography proved to be invaluable in these projects, for clearly, all of the girls, even the very young ones, could see

the possibilities of alternative gendered identities in their worlds. Their lan

guage was full of allusions to the exciting transformative images in advertise

ments, television, magazines, and video clips, suggesting that it was desirable and possible to change who they were and how they saw themselves. The girls expressed the possibility for greater control over their lives, but they also

seemed to understand that such freedom was romantic and fantastic. For, in

spite of all the media messages to the contrary, they knew that self-making is

hard work. Identity is not really like a fashion item that can be put on and off at will. For all of these girls, as for most of us, there were many aspects of their lives that were non-negotiable because they were unsayable. They were sym bolic constraints that could be tested out through their serious play, but ulti

mately had to be retained. This is what Bourdieu describes as "the feel for the

game" (see, for example, Bourdieu 1993), with too much at stake to seriously contemplate anything other than what is already known and safe. It is a deli cate and sometimes dangerous process, this self making, and in our postin dustrial world, it is the camera and related technologies which have proved a

powerful tool for young people in their search for and creation of that illusive and ultimately impossible "real me."9




NOTES

1. Baker's doctoral research was supervised by Bloustien because of an interest in Bloustien's

methodology of auto-visual ethnography. In Baker's research, started in 2000, the girls were all pre-teens, between the ages of eight to eleven. However, contact continued with

some of the girls for 2001 and 2002. In Bloustien's project (fieldwork 1993- 1996,

2001-2002) most of the girls were fifteen at the beginning of the fieldwork, and they stayed with the project for three years until they were eighteen.

2. See Bloustien (2003) for more details.

3. The use of 'play' in this essay has a very particular meaning. Drawing on Bourdieu's

metaphor of game (1993), the concept of play used here should be understood as an

embodied strategy, one that equates with pleasure but not triviality (see Handelman 1990; Hirner 1982), closely tied to identity and notions of self. It is a means for dealing with

uncertainty, indicating attempts to work within perceived or internalized constraints, which are used to "designate the objectively orientated lines of action which social agents

continually construct in and through practice" (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 129). 4. In some cases, however, older siblings or parents did attempt to censor what was selected

and videoed and who was holding the camera. It is important to remember that the expe rience for most men and women in relation to technology is different. Men and boys

grow up ideally expecting to know a great deal about technology, about how machines

and tools work. On the other hand, women are not usually socialized into understand

ing technical matters. They are expected to be good with people rather than things and to value interpersonal skills, to focus on emotion (see Bloustien 2003: 49).

5. The possibility of exploitation from us as researchers was clearly a concern for parents and authority figures. Our use of the camera was one strategy we deployed as an attempt to overcome this problem.

6. Mary was arrested during the time of the fieldwork. See Bloustien (1999; 2003) for more

detail concerning Mary's particular circumstances and similar examples. 7. Our bodies are inescapable. The body "is the locus of all that threatens our attempts at

control. It overwhelms, it erupts and disrupts" (Bordo 1988: 92). 8. One of the worst scenarios for a teenager from her own point of view is discovering that

the face in the mirror has a blemish that she had not noticed before. However, highly sig nificantly 'zits' can be covered up, disguised, and eventually they can disappear as

though they had never been.

9. Bloustien and Baker are two of the Australian investigators who are deploying the same methods of auto-visual ethnography with many more young people, boys and girls, in an

international project called "Playing for Life." This longitudinal project explores the

music-making practices of marginalized youth across six different research sites in Aus

tralia, the U.K., the U.S., and Germany. See Bloustien and Peters (2003).

REFERENCES

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1991. Writing Women's Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Baker, Sarah. 2001. '"Rock on, Baby!': Pre-Teen Girls and Popular Music." Continuum 15, no. 3: 359-371.

. 2002. "Bardot, Britney, Bodies and Breasts: Pre-teen Girls' Negotiations of the Cor

poreal in Relation to Pop Stars and Their Music." Perfect Beat: The Pacific Journal of Research into Contemporary Music and Popular Culture 6, no. 1: 18-32.




Barthes, Roland. 2000. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard. Lon

don: Vintage.

Battaglia, Deborah, ed. 1995. Rhetorics of Self-Making. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1986. "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus." Pp. 286-298 in Narrative Apparatus and Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen.

New York: Columbia University Press.

Benjamin, Walter. [1935] 1968. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

Pp. 217-251 in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 1st edition. New

York: Schocken Books.

Bhabha, Homi. 1987. "Interrogating Identity." Pp. 5-11. In Identity: The Real Me—Postmod

ernism and the Question of Identity, ed. Lisa Appignanesi. London: ICA.

Bloustien, Geraldine. 1998. "It's Different to a Mirror 'Cos it Talks to You." Pp. 115-133 in

Wired Up: Young People and the Electronic Media, ed. S. Howard. London: Falmer Press.

. 1999 "

The Consequence of Being a Gift." The Australian Journal of Anthropology

10, no. 1: 77-93.

. 2003. Girl Making. New York: Berghahn. Bloustien, Geraldine, and Margaret Peters. 2003. "Playing for Life: New Approaches to

Researching Youth and Their Music Practices." Youth Studies Australia 22, no. 2 (June): 32-40.

Bordo, Susan. 1988. "Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Nature."

Pp. 87-118 in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Diamond and

Lee Quinby. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley: Uni

versity of California Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. Sociology in Question. London: Sage Publications.

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loi'c J. D. Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cam

bridge: Polity Press.

Crapanzano, Vincent. 1986. "Hermes' Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic

Description." Pp. 51-76 in Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dwyer, Kevin. 1982. Moroccan Dialogues. Prospect Hills, 111.: Waveland Press.

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and Other. New York: Columbia Press.

. 1991. Time and the Work of Anthropology. Philadelphia: Harwood Academic

Publishers.

Forrester, John. 1987. "A Brief History of the Subject." Pp. 13-16 in Identity: The Real Me—

Postmodernism and the Question of Identity, ed. Lisa Appignanesi. London: ICA.

Gergen, Kenneth J., and Mary M. Gergen. 1991. "Toward Reflexive Methodologies." Pp. 76-95 in Research and Reflexivity, ed. Frederick Steier. London: Sage.

Goffman, Erving. 1970. Strategic Interaction. Oxford: Blackwell.

Gross, Larry, John S. Katz, and Jay Ruby, eds. 1988. "Introduction." Pp. 3-33 in Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film, and Television. New York:

Oxford University Press.

Hall, Stuart. 1987. "Mimimal Selves." Pp. 44-46 in Identity: The Real Me—Postmodernism

and the Question of Identity, ed. Lisa Appignanesi. London: ICA.

. 1996. "Introduction: Who Needs 'Identity'?" Pp. 1-17 in Questions of Cultural Iden

tity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage.

Handelman, Don. 1990. Models and Mirrors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Higonnet, Anne. 1998. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. Lon

don: Thames & Hudson.

Holland, Patricia. 1997. "'Sweet it is to Scan Personal Photographs and Popular

Photography." Pp. 103-150 in Photography: A Critical Introduction, ed. L. Wells.

London: Routledge.




Hood, Suzanne, P. Kelley, and B. Mayall. 1996. "Children as Research Subjects: A Risky

Enterprise." Children and Society 10, no. 2: 117-128.

Kellehear, Allan. 1993. The Unobtrusive Researcher. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Moore, Henrietta. 1994. A Passion for Difference. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Peace, Ade. 1991. "The Family Album." Unpublished seminar paper to Department of

Anthropology. University of Adelaide.

Prosser, Jon, and Dona Schwartz. 1998. "Photographs within the Sociological Research

Process." Pp. 115-130 in Image-Based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers, ed. J. Prosser. London: Falmer Press.

Rosaldo, M. 1986. "From the Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor." Pp. 77-97 in Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books.

. 1989. "Representing the Colonised: Anthropology's Interlocutors." Critical Inquiry

15, no. 2: 205-225.

Sciama, Lidia. 1993. "The Problem of Privacy in Mediterranean Anthropology." Pp. 87-111

in Women and Space, ed. Shirley Ardener. Oxford: Berg.

Skeggs, Beverly. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender. London: Sage. Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Smith, Dorothy. 1988. "Femininity as Discourse." Pp. 37-59 in Becoming Feminine, ed.

Leslie G. Roman and Linda Christian-Smith. London: Falmer Press.

Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: New York Dell Publishing.

Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. Chicago: Chicago Uni

versity Press.

. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Per

forming Arts Journal Publications.

Walkerdine, Valerie, Helen Lucey, and June Melody. 2001. Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial

Explorations of Gender and Class. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Wallman, Sandra., Y. Dhooge, A. Goldman, and B. Kosmin. 1980. "Ethnography by Proxy:

Strategies for Research in the Inner City." Ethnos 1-2: 5-38.



Documents

On Not Talking to Strangers: Researching the Micro Worlds of Girls through Visual Auto-ethnographic Practices